March 26, 2007

No Limits

by hilzoy

You all probably read TPM anyways, but in case you missed it, Josh Marshall has two really good posts up tonight. The first one, which I'm just going to encourage everyone to read, is here. The second is an attempt to answer the question: what's the big deal with the US Attorneys scandal?

"For all the intensity and hostility awash in our politics, there are some lines we just assume aren't going to be crossed, lines that are so basic that the civil compact itself can't easily survive if they're not respected.

One of those is the vote. Whoever's in power and however intense things get, most of us assume that the party in power won't interfere with the vote count. We also assume that the administration won't use the IRS to harrass or imprison political opponents. And we assume that criminal prosecutions will be undertaken or not undertaken on the facts.

Yes, there's prosecutorial discretion. And the grandstanding, press-hungry DA is almost a cliche. But when a politician gets indicted for corruption we basically all assume it's because they're corrupt -- or, given the assumption of innocence, that the prosecution is undertaken because the prosecutor believes their case is strong and that the defendent committed the crime.

This is followed by a lengthy acknowledgment that the system is imperfect, that some of the people in it don't always play by the rules, etc. Then:

So, all of this is to say that no system is perfect and partisan affiliation may distort the justice system at the margins.

But none of what we're seeing here is at the margins. What we seem to see are repeated cases in which US Attorneys were fired for not pursuing bogus prosecutions of persons of the opposite party. Or vice versa. There's little doubt that that is why McKay and Iglesias were fired and there's mounting evidence that this was the case in other firings as well. The idea that a senator calls a US Attorney at home just weeks before a federal elections and tries to jawbone him into indicting someone to help a friend get reelected is shocking. Think about it for a second. It's genuinely shocking. At a minimum one would imagine such bad acts take place with more indirection and deniability. And yet the Domenici-Iglesias call has now been relegated to the status of a footnote in the expanding scandal, notwithstanding the fact that there's now documentary evidence showing that Domenici's substantial calls to the White House and Justice Department played a direct role in getting Iglesias fired.

So what you have here is this basic line being breached. But not only that. What is equally threatening is the systematic nature of the offense. This isn't one US Attorney out to get Democrats or one rogue senator trying to monkey around with the justice system. The same thing happened in Washington state and New Mexico -- with the same sort of complaints being received and acted upon at the White House and the Department of Justice. Indeed, there appears to have been a whole process in place to root out prosecutors who wouldn't prostitute their offices for partisan goals.

We all understand that politics and the law aren't two hermetically sealed domains. And we understand that partisanship may come into play at the margins. But we expect it to be the exception to the rule and a rare one. But here it appears to have become the rule rather than the exception, a systematic effort at the highest levels to hijack the Justice Department and use it to advance the interest of one party over the other by use of selective prosecution."

Every so often, I have occasion to say: I am not normally nearly this angry about the conduct of political officials, Democrat or Republican. Honestly, I'm not. The reason Bush strikes me as different in kind from most of the other Presidents I've seen (Nixon being the obvious exception) is that most of them have believed, more or less, in the kinds of lines Josh talks about, whereas as far as I can tell, Bush does not acknowledge their existence. I think that for Bush and Rove, there are virtually no limits at all on what they would be prepared to do to gain some political advantage.

For the most part, during my lifetime, political arguments have operated within certain basic limits that everyone took for granted. They could be absolutely vicious within those limits, but the limits still existed. For instance, most politicians generally seemed to agree that the purpose of government was to, well, govern, and that while that was consistent with certain amounts of graft, it was not consistent with turning an entire Department into a political machine. They recognized that there were agencies in the government whose job it was to find out relevant facts, and that, broadly speaking, the people in those agencies should not be leaned on too hard. (I'm thinking of the various scientific agencies -- the FDA, for instance -- as well as intelligence agencies.) They put in political appointees and hacks, but they generally also recognized that federal agencies are supposed to accomplish certain tasks, and for the most part they allowed them to perform those tasks. They also tended to have some respect, however minimal, for the Constitution.

What made Nixon's crimes so genuinely shocking was that he really seemed to have tried to use the mechanisms of government for pure political advantage. He sicced the IRS on his political opponents. He had his people breaking into buildings -- not just the DNC headquarters in Watergate, but Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist's office. He wiretapped all sorts of people, like adolescent me. He actually considered bombing the Brookings Institution. And he threw Constitutional checks and balances out the window: he broke the laws, he lied to Congress, he tried to shut down the Special Prosecutor, not to mention little things like bombing a neutral country without informing Congress.

With this administration, it's the same thing, with this one difference: that Nixon actually seemed to have some views about policy, views he cared about, while as far as I can tell this President has none, outside his peculiar ideas about the Middle East. Like Nixon, he has thrown out all the most basic assumptions that the government relies on. You can see it in the outing of Valerie Plame: someone who had made real sacrifices, and perhaps risked her life, for her country was exposed for no reason other than pure political benefit. You can see it in the President's statements leading up to the war in Iraq. I don't want to get into the question whether Bush technically lied or not; that's semantics, and it's less important than the obvious fact that he and his administration went around making a series of claims -- that there were links between Saddam and al Qaeda, that there was any remote chance that Iraq might get a nuclear weapon -- that they either knew or should have known were false. You can see it in the President's promises to rebuild New Orleans, a promise he promptly forgot as soon as the klieg lights were turned off. You can see it in this story about the politicization of the GSA. And you can see it in the US Attorneys scandal.

They know no limits at all.

For the record, I think that one of the things that enables this sort of behavior is the fact that so many people are already convinced that all politicians are corrupt. I think we need to get better both at recognizing when this is not so, and at distinguishing different forms of corruption. That none of them are OK goes without saying. Still, there's a world of difference, to me, between someone who hires his brother-in-law to do nothing, which costs the taxpayer the brother-in-law's salary, but does no further harm; and someone, like Duke Cunningham, who gets his dubious friends contracts performing important jobs for the Department of Defense and the CIA, which can compromise our security and get people killed. And there's a big difference between either of them and someone who corrupts an entire branch of government, like the Department of Justice, which undermines the foundations of our government. We need to become better at distinguishing these things, and while we should not accept any of them, we should react to them differently.

And, of course, we should allow for the possibility that some politicians are actually decent people who are not corrupt at all. If we assume that that's impossible, we will be unable to respond to any decent politicians who appear; and that would be a real pity.